Large Hardon Collider

[Max™]

YOU... SHALL... NOT... DIGIVOLVE!

So far the latest info I've found is just NS articles like this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-to-higgs.html

[Acturus]

Apparently the Milky Way is going all "pew pew" on us:

Also, star threesome.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...ter-our-galaxy

Hubble Spots Hypervelocity Star Speeding From the Milky Way's Center at 1.6 Million MPH

Yesterday saw the discovery of an extremely massive, extremely bright star in a neighboring galaxy. Today NASA says Hubble has discovered a fast-moving star that’s much closer – but getting further away at a very rapid rate. The hypervelocity star being expelled from the center of the Milky Way is traveling away from our galaxy at 1.6 million miles per hour, three times faster than our own sun’s orbital velocity in the Milky Way.

How did it get moving so fast? The explanation likely includes a stellar ménage a trois gone horribly wrong some 100 million years ago. A three-star system likely wandered too close to the center of the galaxy and lost one of its members to the black hole that resides there. The momentum of the captured star – and keep in mind, near the center of the galaxy things are really moving – was transferred to the remaining two, bumping them up to warp speed and throwing them violently outward from the center. As they jetted away at high speed, the larger of the two absorbed the other, creating the large, very speedy blue straggler we see today.

Initially there was some uncertainty over the star’s origins; its distance from the center of the Milky Way (it’s now cruising some 200,000 light years out) suggests it must be 100 million years old. But its mass, nine times that of the sun, and the fact that it’s a blue star indicates that it should have only lived 20 million years.

Hubble’s ability to measure the star’s trajectory confirms its origins at the center of the Milky Way, which means given its color and distance it must be a blue straggler – a star spawned from the merger of two smaller stars. Following the speeding star on its travels could lend researchers some insight into how galaxies form as well as how dark matter influences bodies moving through space outside the Milky Way.

[Max™]

PEW PEW PEW indeed... I noticed this though, which amuses the hell out of my mother and I.

http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...ars-study-says

The researchers extrapolated a roof's CO2 offset over its average lifespan. If all roofs were converted to white or cool colors, they would offset about 24 gigatons (24 billion metric tons) of CO2, but only once. But assuming roofs last about 20 years, the researchers came up with 1.2 gigatons per year. That equates to offsetting the emissions of roughly 300 million cars, all the cars in the world, for 20 years.

We have both been fond of (only slightly in jest) telling people if they're so fucking worried about the environment, shut the fuck up, and paint your roof white.

Though, SHE says white, I say mirror that shit, either way... pretty funny.

[Neosutra]

To be fair, it offset's 300 million cars for 20 years, or 5 Hummers for 3 days.

[Max™]

Badump-tish, this is why I ain't mad at ya'll niggas, besides being fun to argue with, sometimes you produce truly funny shit like that.

[Mizango]

To be fair, it offset's 300 million cars for 20 years, or 5 Hummers for 3 days.

rofl.

[Max™]

Though this was interesting: http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...father-paradox

Postselection is one of the notions that makes quantum computing simultaneously so exciting and perplexing; the idea that for a super-complex problem riddled with variables, you solve by letting the variables take any value at random and postselect for the one combination that makes the problem true. Put another way, rather than solving all the possible combinations to the problem one at a time, you run all possible combinations simultaneously and extract the set of variables that make the problem true.


Quantum mechanics seems to allow for such simultaneous computations of all possible outcomes theoretically, though actually making it happen is another issue altogether (such quantum computing would blow conventional computing methods out of the water). But combined with quantum teleportation – using quantum entanglement to reproduce a quantum state in space that previously existed at another point in space – MIT’s Seth Lloyd and colleagues say you can theoretically teleport a particle back in time.

As I once phrased it, "convince the Universe you were supposed to be somewhere else".

More on the Thorne method as well:

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/articl...-travel?page=2

Spoiler: show

Once the antigravity scaffolding is holding open the portal, the traveler passing through would emerge in a distant place. But time travelers, of course, want to journey not just geographically but temporally. So Thorne's next step was to desynchronize the two regions on either side of the wormhole.



To do this, he applied an old trick of Einstein's. A major consequence of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is that time slows for objects that move quickly. Thorne applied this principle to one of the two black holes that make up a wormhole. Imagine lassoing one of the black holes-perhaps by trapping it inside a cage of negative energy-and towing it around the universe at close to the speed of light. That black hole, and therefore that end of the wormhole, would age more slowly than the stationary end of the wormhole. Over time, the black holes would become desynchronized, two objects connected through the wormhole but existing in different eras. An explorer who entered the stationary end of the wormhole would exit the moving end, many years earlier than when he departed, making the wormhole a true time portal.

[Eliseos]

Postselection sounds almost like non-determinism in computer science. You have a computing machine built, it has multiple paths it can take on the same input, one of the many outputs can end in an accept state resulting in the machine accepting the input. My professor in theory of computation actually worked out the definition of one from a paper he read on the subject.

[laxninja]

Postselection sounds almost like non-determinism in computer science. You have a computing machine built, it has multiple paths it can take on the same input, one of the many outputs can end in an accept state resulting in the machine accepting the input. My professor in theory of computation actually worked out the definition of one from a paper he read on the subject.

lol thats so sick, hes not like one of those pro bono prof's that posts his work online for free is he? ;p

[Eliseos]

Oh oops, I meant he showed us the definition of a quantum computer. Non-determinism state machines have been around since Turing. The stuff my professor was explaining to us was pretty fascinating though, been trying to find the article.

[Max™]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10746900

'Striking event'
Several possible detections of top quarks have been made recently by the LHC's Atlas and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments.
Atlas has seen nine collision events compatible with the top quark; CMS has observed 3-4 candidate events. But physicists stressed that more data was needed in order to support the conclusive observation of top quark production at the LHC.
The detection of the top quark would represent a small milestone for the European lab, which is making steady progress after the accident which forced it to shut down for 14 months shortly after its "switch on" in 2008.

And top quark physics is not well explained; studying it presents the opportunity to carry out important scientific work at the LHC.
The top quark was first discovered in 1995 by the Tevatron accelerator, operated by Fermilab in Illinois. Since then, the US accelerator has produced the particles in abundance. But they have never been produced outside Fermilab.

Hunting the Higgs
Despite decades trying, particle physicists have so far failed to detect the Higgs. The boson particle is crucial to the current theory which has been devised to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles, known as the Standard Model.
But rival physicists working at the Tevatron machine now believe the Higgs is within reach of the US accelerator.
They now hope to detect the elusive particle themselves, especially if the Tevatron's lifetime can be extended by three years until 2014, as is currently being discussed.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...7_48471748.jpg
CMS saw a potential top quark "decay" into two other particles.

If the Higgs boson exists in a form known as the charged Higgs, Dr Lucotte explained, the top quark could be crucial to detecting it.
Elementary particles generated at colliders "decay", or transform, into other sub-atomic particles, which may or may not be stable.
The close coupling of the charged Higgs to the top quark means that, if the Higgs boson is heavier than the top quark, it might reveal itself by decaying into a top quark and another particle known as a b-quark.
If the Higgs is lighter, then the top quark might decay into a Higgs and a b-quark.
Other physicists envisage a different type of Higgs, one which fits the constraints of the Standard Model.
The top quark might also act as the progenitor for so-called "supersymmetric" particles. These would represent an entirely new class of particles, predicted to exist by theorists, but which have yet to be observed at particle accelerators.

[Max™]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...w-planets.html

Hundreds of new planets have been discovered by Nasa's new space probe, sparking new hope of life outside our solar system.
Up to 140 of the newly-found planets are similar in size to Earth, scientists have said.

The Kepler probe - which constantly monitors more than 150,000 stars for tell-tale signs of planets orbiting them - also may have found five new solar systems, Nasa said.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/...21_468x390.jpg

New planets orbiting such stars will block radiating light, and this tiny decrease is measured and interpreted to show the size and nature of the objects.
The probe monitors three constellations - Cygnus, Lyra and Draco using a special telescope equipped with a 95 megapixel camera.
To qualify as a 'candidate planet', the telescope must record light being distorted three times to ensure the results are not just an anomaly.
The initial findings mean the number of habitable planets in space could run into millions.

Professor Dimitri Sasselov, another member of the Kepler team, said: 'The next step after Kepler will be to study the atmospheres of the planets and see if we can see signs of life.'
Planets found so far include CoRoT - 7b, a rocky globe almost five times the mass of Earth but with a molten side because it orbits its star extremely closely.
The largest is Wasp-17b, which has a radius of 66,000 miles compared with Earth's 3,963 miles.

[Neosutra]

Sweet, wonder what kind of complex biological life is sitting on some of those rocks measuring our atmospheric spectrums and posting on their alien internets..

[Max™]

Wonder what their porn is like...

Wait, no, I don't think I wanna know.

[Mizango]

Sweet, wonder what kind of complex biological life is sitting on some of those rocks measuring our atmospheric spectrums and posting on their alien internets..

I chuckle to myself from time to time as I consider the possibilities of this very thing happening.

[Max™]

Wut, those maniacs, they won't be happy until they have more pewpewpew in their zoomzoomboom toys will they?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...-straight.html

It cost £7 billion to build and has been fraught with problems since it was first switched on.

But now scientists behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland want to build an even bigger machine, it will be announced today.

Instead of whirling atoms in giant rings like at Cern, scientists now want a next-generation machine that will fire them in a straight line.
Scientists from CERN will reach out to China, India and Russia to help fund the next £8.5 billion step of the project at a conference in Paris today.
The new machine would be a successor to the LHC which was launched with great fanfare in September 2008, but days later was sidetracked


Plans for the next step, a 31-mile tunnel called the International Linear Collider, have long been under discussion and scientists now need to find funding, particle physicist Guy Wormser said. They hope the machine could be turned on in 2020 or 2025.
With the LHC 'we made a machine which allowed us to make a big leap in understanding, a sort of enlightener, and now we study and detail things and that's the linear collider', he said. 'It's the future of our discipline.'
Instead of crashing protons together, the new international collider will accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalent, he said.
Depending on who wants to host it - and how much they are willing to pay - the ILC could potentially be built anywhere in the world.

[Eliseos]

I'd rather they be robots than biological life.

[BerenTebogo]

Amazing.

[Neosutra]

That may be one of the most awesome things I've ever seen.

[Eliseos]

That's awesome.